In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the opportunities and limitations of the idea of ‘the global’ as a way of organising history, and explored the relationship between the global and the decolonial. Adnan Husain is a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian at Queen’s University, Canada. He has a particular interest in the relationship between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the medieval Mediterranean and we particularly enjoyed talking to him about the question of methodology: how do we write a new history of the world?

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In The Woman Question in Islamic Studies (Princeton UP, 2024), the Introduction of which is available at the publisher's website, Kecia Ali delves into the deeply entrenched ways sexism continues to shape the academic landscape of Islamic Studies.

Despite the growing presence of women scholars in the field, Ali finds that women’s work remains marginalized, relegated to the periphery while male-authored research is treated as more authoritative. Ali tackles this issue with a mix of sharp analysis and humor, showing how gender biases persist at every level of scholarship—from course syllabi to citations to job hiring practices to editorial decisions. Through a combination of broad surveys and focused analyses, she uncovers the patterns of exclusion that, to quote her, “beget exclusion.” The issue isn’t simply of women not being cited or mentioned in indices and footnotes and bibliographies, but also of how women’s scholarship is talked about compared to how men’s scholarship is described, hyped, and promoted.

Even male scholars who present themselves as gender-inclusive often overlook or fail to cite women’s scholarship, which further highlights the deep-seated nature of this problem and of the pattern that Ali is exploring.

The book doesn't just highlight the problem but also provides actionable strategies for transforming the field. Ali offers a practical "Beginner’s Guide to Eradicating Sexism in Islamic Studies," addressing areas like peer reviewing, citation practices, curriculum design, invitation for lectures and talks. This guide provides scholars with tools to counteract the biases that limit women’s visibility and contribution. With a keen eye on the wider academic context, Ali situates these issues not only within Islamic Studies but as part of broader patterns of gender inequality in disciplines across the academy – such as in Economics, in Political Science, in Philosophy, in the natural sciences, in Jewish Studies, in Religious Studies broadly. The Woman Question in Islamic Studies is both a compelling critique and a roadmap for change, urging scholars to recognize the ethical and intellectual importance of equitable citation and inclusion.

In our conversation today, Ali identifies some of the main points of the book, explains how the book came about and what her methodology is; we also discuss why women aren’t being cited and why their exclusion from scholarship matters, why women are more likely than men to be more equitable in their citation practices, and how the book has been received so far and how Ali hopes people will respond.

Ali and Lolo Serrano have co-author an article examining gender bias across fifteen years of book reviews in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2006–2020), which has been published in the same journal (accessible here). The article concludes that reviewers of all gender consistently prioritize and celebrate men’s scholarship at a disproportionate rate, and male reviewers are found to cite the works of male scholars at a significantly higher rate.

This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, students, and others professionals in Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, Gender Studies, and related fields, as well as anyone interested in academic equity and the dynamics of citation practices. It is an essential read for those looking to understand the persistent gender disparities in academia and for educators, researchers, and policymakers seeking practical strategies for fostering a more inclusive and equitable scholarly environment. Moreover, anyone invested in challenging systemic sexism across disciplines, from the humanities to the social sciences, will find Ali’s insights both compelling and transformative. And especially those who don’t believe gender is relevant to their research, or who don’t think there are enough women they can cite in their works, will find the book immensely useful.

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Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police.

War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Dr. Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked—but not reducible to—the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Dr. Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population.

How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post-9/11 imperial warfare.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause: The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods (Routledge, 2024) provides an historical overview of Palestine's Christian communities and their role in the Palestinian nationalist movement during the late Ottoman and British mandatory periods. More than being a history of Palestine's Christian Arabs, the book focuses on Palestine's Christians during the formative period of Palestinian Arab national identity, attentive to the broader topic of the relationship between nationalism and religion--in this case, between Arab identity and Islam. Whereas until recently historians have tended to assume that national and religious identities are distinct and mostly mutually exclusive things, more recent scholarship has addressed the fact that often there exists considerable overlap between the two, though it should be noted, often in ways that are not by any means inherently exclusive of those not belonging to the majority faith, as is the case here. The relationship is also an ever-changing one, hence the final chapter of the book, which functions as something of an epilogue regarding the current status of Palestine's Christians vis-à-vis their place in the nationalist cause and relationship with the broader Muslim population. The book will be of interest to historians and scholars focused on the modern Middle East, Palestinian history, Muslim-Christian inter-communal relations, and the relationship between nationalism and religion.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. We talked about her important work on anticolonial resistance, about the importance of the literary in imagining liberation, and about the relationship between the Muslim and the decolonial – and also had the opportunity to hear about some of her upcoming work. This episode is the first in our series on ReOrienting History.

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In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France.

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William Gallois joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024.

Qayrawān: The Amuletic City investigates the fascinating history of the Tunisian city of Qayrawān, which in the last years of the nineteenth century found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why.

Using visual archaeological methods, Qayrawān highlights the ‘unknown artist’ as an actor of ‘unnoticed agency’ and a practitioner of living traditional arts. Locating pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera, Gallois identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing―which lay exclusively within the domains of women―onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.

The book challenges tacit assumptions of foreign categories and standards of aesthetics imposed upon Islamic and African art. It contributes to further explorations of the exploration of the ways in which Islam was interwoven with preexisting cultures and forms of expression, particularly in calling for a continued reimagining of the study of “Islamic art.” The book makes welcome contributions to Islamic, African, and Middle Eastern studies, particularly in relation to colonial and art histories. It will be welcomed by scholars of Islamic Studies, African Studies, and Art History.

William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, in England. In addition to Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, Prof Gallois is the author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (2013) and The Administration of Sickness (2008), among other works.

Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.

He can be reached by email at: [email protected]

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In this episode of In Conversation, Claudia Radiven talks with Abdul-Basit Shaikh on PREVENT (Preventing Violent Extremism), academia and representation.

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In Ayesha Jalal’s latest work Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) readers are introduced to the “roshan khayali” (enlightened thought) of South Asian Muslim thinkers spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the course of eleven chapters Jalal highlights the contributions of diverse Muslim voices to debates about reason, religion, liberality, belonging, and ideology. Familiar South Asian Muslim figures including Mirza Ghalib, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and Fazlur Rahman are brought into conversation with perhaps lesser known intellectuals such as the mid-nineteenth century author Nazir Ahmad, or the twentieth-century artist Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi.

Broad themes covered in the book include how these Muslims articulated notions of religion as faith (iman) as compared to religion as identity, South Asian Muslim contributions to global theories of modernity, reason, and “enlightened” thought, how thinkers within Muslim roshan khayali discourse constructed notions of gender and women’s autonomy, and the role of literature and the visual arts in genealogies of South Asian Muslim intellectual thought.

Dr. Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University (USA). She was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. She is the author of numerous books and research articles, including The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985), Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (2000), and Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (with Sugata Bose, 2022).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.

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The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (Routledge, 2024) investigates the relationship between sacred narratives and the development of character. Focusing on the warrior ethos expressed in accounts of the Battle of Karbala, Zargar searches for the place of the martial virtues in modern life and warfare.

This book is the first of its kind in taking a virtue ethics approach to the study of Islamic history. It offers an ethical analysis of arguably the most pivotal moment in Islamic history. To do so, it makes use of interdisciplinary methods, especially global philosophy and religious studies, and draws on philosophical concepts spanning from Nietzsche to Iqbal. The book’s clear and engaging prose makes it accessible to readers seeking a profound understanding of intersections between practical philosophy and religious myths.

This book targets upper-level undergraduate readers seeking to discover Islamic ethics. It will serve nonspecialists, specialists in Shiʿi Islamic studies, and all those interested in Islamic ethics, virtue ethics, cross-cultural philosophy, Nietzsche studies, military science, and religious studies.

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